There is a reason why the Climate Week that has just ended in New York immediately gives way to another central international food moment: the International Day of Awareness on food waste and loss. And looking at today’s world, the answer seems very obvious.
According to the Food Waste Index Report 2021931 million tonnes of food (17% of total food production) were wasted globally in 2019, 61% of which came from domestic use. In terms of environmental impact, this means that 3.3 Giga tons of CO2 equivalent, 250 km3 of water (three times the volume of Lake Geneva) and 1.4 billion hectares of land (almost 30% of the world’s agricultural area) were issued and used to produce food that will never be consumed. With this data, it is easy to understand why food waste is increasingly recognized as one of the most critical ecological and ethical challenges for humanity. But also a serious social and economic problem: in fact, the waste of food also represents an incredible waste of money in terms of resource costs ($1 trillion in losses per year for waste of labor and material resources for food production), environmental costs ($700 billion per year for waste of carbon, land and water) and social costs ($900 billion a year for rising health costs and loss of productivity of individuals weakened by nutritional deficiencies and food insecurity). Yet far beyond the paradox of today’s world - where a third of the food produced is wasted while the whole world suffers from malnutrition, there are the reasons behind these senseless actions to do more harm.
At the domestic level, food is thrown because of the forgetfulness of leaving food in the refrigerator for too long, for lack of creativity in the management and reuse of leftovers, for inadequate planning of meals and spending, for laziness, for the tendency to prepare and serve too much food, for an almost compulsive purchase of food, for fear of remedy without. Our country also knows this, where according to data reported by the Waste Watcher Report 2022every Italian wastes more than half a kg of food every seven days.
Yet in all this, there remains one more piece to consider and that researchers have recently begun to highlight. Another deep scourge that is affecting our agri-food systems, excessive nutrition, should actually be considered as a new form of food waste.
The fact that the world produces and consumes more food than is necessary for human consumption is now known in high-income countries. studies show that the daily caloric intake of countries such as the United States, Canada and Europe exceeds 3,000 kcal per day per capita, 30% more than the real nutritional needs of the urban population. Likewise, over the past four decades, la prevalenza globale dell’obesità è quasi triplicata e continua ad aumentare, also affecting low and middle income countries, due to the spread of junk foods rich in sugar, salt and fat in all regions of the world.
What is the link with food waste? Their incredibly similar common traits.
In fact, both excessive nutrition and food waste are triggered by easy availability, access and propensity to buy food.
Both excessive nutrition and food waste are based on overeating (ingested or thrown away): data reveal that obese people consume 18% more food than those on a standard diet.
Both excessive nutrition and waste worsen our environmental footprint on Earth: data published by a recent study on hypernutrition in Italy show that how much CO2 is emitted as a result of an excessive relationship with food: 6.15 Mt of CO2-eq per year, compared to the average of 1.75 t of CO2-eq emissions related to the diet of people who are overweight. According to this study, obese and overweight adults are responsible for an increase in emissions of respectively +24% and +12% of CO2-eq.
Read the article on Nova!
